The Garden Dummy's first appearance...

Hello, and thanks for reading my post. I apologise for the length, future posts will be much shorter! I hope you can help me.

In January 2005 we viewed the house we now live in. May 2005 we moved in, and this was the state of the garden:



Until this house, I had never lived in a house which had a garden. I ran from anything green. I am The Garden Dummy. Upon seeing this garden, I wanted to hand back the keys and ask for a do-over.

I hightailed it back to Chicago to visit my family, leaving my husband to manually dig out all of those weeds up the left and right side of the path. The weeds gone, we laid down some weed barrier, put bark on top of it, and left it. I'm actually not sure when we put the barrier down, I think this might be the third year they've been there.



The birds have slowly been carrying away the bark for their nests, the membrane has weeds growing on top of it, and some very cheeky weeds have grown straight up through it. I started bringing up the weed barrier, and underneath there was a network of little thread-like roots all throughout the soil. Everywhere. Is this normal? Am I just making a lot more weeds by chopping up these roots, giving them air and halfway decent soil? Or are they dead and I don't need to worry about it?



There are also some white roots (pic below) which look pretty healthy for having spent nearly three years under weed barrier. Do you know what this is?



I just don't know what to do with the soil which has been covered. I thought that after three years-ish under the barrier, I'd bring it up and there would be no more weeds, or weeds which were clearly dead. But as you can see from the pic, that's not the case.

Assuming I get this soil in order, I don't think I can handle trying to grow anything in it yet. We have so much work to do, we will be bringing soil through from other parts through the garden and I'm afraid I'm going to transfer more weeds around and contaminate it. Should I put replacement weed barrier on it? Should I let it 'air out' for a while?

If I could just have some sort of garden brain cell transplant from one of you that would really be helpful. I'm very happy to put in the hard graft, I just don't know when/where/how/what to do!

The other big project is putting in borders on both sides of the lawn. But I have the same issue, namely weeds all over the place, and when I turn the soil, it's all full of roots, and I don't know if this is normal, or if I'm meant to get rid of all of this soil and replace it with something else. We live in a terraced house with terrible access, anything coming out of the garden has to go straight through the kitchen and dining room and out the front door. Similarly, we live on a narrow street with horrible parking, so getting a skip is not practical. I kind of need to work with what I've got.

I feel like I'm digging a hole to China with a teaspoon! (To be fair, if I started digging a hole from Shrewsbury, I would come out somewhere in the South Pacific, off the southeast coast of New Zealand.)

Thank you all for your patience (and wisdom!).

 

Basically, Erika, you are going to have to work at it. The garden needs to be dug over and all the weeds and roots removed. Weed fibre doesn`t kill weeds it just suppresses them.:gnthb:

 

Hi Erika and welcome to GC.

Well, the good news is that you've laid down an attractive basic structure for your garden and I'm sure that in time, it will look spectacular.

The bad news is that I agree with Dai, that you've got a long haul ahead of you removing those weeds. I prefer to dig weeds out by hand partly because I only use chemicals as a last resort but also because you get to know your soil better when you dig it over. You get to find out where the builder hid all the spare bricks and rubbish and where your neighbour's tree roots are invading your borders!

So, tackle it in stages and pace yourself. The hard work will pay dividends in the long run.

Good luck.

 

Hi Erika

Decide what you want from the garden (low maintenance, cottage garden style, mixed borders?) and start out with that in mind. If you change your mind half way through, that's part of the fun

Decide what you want to do with those two rather impressively sized borders on either side of the path (leading up to the tree) and start slowly. You can't do everything in one go - little by little is the best way.

And feel free to ask loads of questions. Loads of helpful and friendy bods on here who can answer them

 

I don't think the fine white roots are anything bothersome.

The fat white ones in your bottom picture are bothersome :( look like bindweed to me. They will be coming under the fence from next door (or maybe they've tunnelled in from a couple of miles away from that matter (slight exaggeration, but that's the appropriate nature of that particular beast :( )

If you want a low maintenance garden I would suggest:

Dig it however you like (Rotavator will do, although it will chop up the roots and make more "weed plants" from them).

Mix in lots of material to enrich the soil. Farmyard manure would be best, or spent mushroom compost (assuming you can get either of those where you live). Otherwise its probably bags of compost / soil enricher from the Garden centre. This is a one-time-deal for the next 5 or 10 years, so be generous.

Get some new weed membrane, and lay it.

Plant shrubs through the membrane (cut an X where each plant will go)

Cover the membrane with bark or garvel, whatever you like the look of.

Sit and enjoy!

The shrubs will be a bit small for 2 or 3 years. If you don't want to wait that long you will have to plant herbaceous plants instead, but they are going to need more work than Shrubs, and will give you more problem trying to plant through weed membrane - they die down in the winter, which will let light in through the holes in the membrane and the weeds will do their best to come up and compete with the plants each spring ...

 

And the weeds will still grow through the membrane.:thumb:

 

Just a quick word about the layout-it's wonderful. Are you going to carry the pathway on?


From experience I would advise not to bother with the membrane, the weeds will poke through-I have grass that is rearing it's head up through some of the stuff I put down just last year, and with the gravel on top of that it is hard going on the fingers to weed it all out. I won't allow weedkiller in the garden ( because I am a kakhanded idiot with that sort of stuff), so I am sort of at a loss as to what to try next for it.


Edit-David beat me to it.

 

Some will, but its a lot less work than "doing it the proper way" :dh:

I would favour spot weeding with herbicide, for example (assuming not adverse to herbicides)

 

Not if there`s bindweed, especially as you reccomended rotovating.:thumb:

 

The very fine white threads under the barrier look to me like fungi, I agree the larger white roots are probably bindweed.

My lazy approach would be to remove the barrier and let the weeds grow for a couple of months or more, then give the whole area that you want barked a good dose of glyphosate weed killer.
You may need to wait another month after that to treat any regrowth.

Then relay the barrier and cover with at least 3 ins of bark.

 

Hi Erika I would say a lot of those roots come from the trees and shrubs in next doors garden on the right hand side,dig down along the fence a couple of feet deep and chop them off then pull them out,you can put a barrier to prevent further ingress of roots 2x2 paving slabs on their edge set in the soil(second hand ones will do) double dig the soil and incorporate lots of manure leave it to weather and settle if weeds do pop up nuke them with a glyphosate weed killer like "roundup" when clear decide what you want to plant in it.

 

You made a great start Erika - well done:gnthb:
Those lovely juicy, fat roots are bindweed rhyzomes and if you chop them up each little piece will rapidly grow into a pretty bindweed plant which will strangle anything it manages to wrap itself around. If you want to propagate bindweed, division of rhyzomes is a good way to do it :D
There are a number of theories regarding the best way to get rid of bindweed but rotavating doesn't figure among them.

Best option if you have time and energy is to fork over the borders and remove the rhyzomes by hand. And if you've a bit more time then sit back for two or three weeks and see what come up and dig it out.

An alternative might be to let some new growth appear and zap it with a systemic weed killer and then replace the matting/membrane and bark.

If the bindweed is present in your neighbouring gardens it will creep into yours under the fences. You can reduce, though maybe not eliminate completely, 'creepage' by burying a barrier along the borders.

Matting/membrane and a good covering of bark does work for us. We've got about 100 square metres covered with it. In our experience it does keep down weeds from below, but weed seeds do blow in and lodge in the bark and germinate above the membrane. These we find are very easily pulled out, but we do have to have a blitz on them two or three times a year before the roots can penetrate the membrane and get a hold in the soil.

You'll get your perfect garden, but it will take a bit of time. Keep taking photos they are a good reminder of the progress you make and the effort you've put into it!